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Guess who FINALLY got a new PC workstation!
Wrong! It’s me! ???? Now, this isn’t a 5 array RAID with 32 gigs of RAM etc. but for me it’s lightning quick. Anyway, not here to brag about my meager upgrade, what I want to know is, I was able to add both HDD’s to this thing so I’ve got 3 now. One of the two that I added was my main hard drive in my old machine, so it’s got a complete operating system, copies of software I installed on the new box so I don’t need it, etc. Should I just go into Windows Explorer and delete everything I don’t need or should I format the whole drive, after backing up the stuff I want to keep?
Also a refresher course on how to set up a RAID (and whether I should even bother) would be nice. Oh, and the cherry on top is, I’m finally moved into my new place and there is a ton of beauty to shoot around here. Yes, everything’s coming up Dukey right now, except for yesterday which was the 3rd anniversary of my wife’s passing. But, gotta keep positive. Thanks in advance for any helpful advice!
Oh, a shout out to Chris, I got the DELL XPS 8910, i7, GEFORCE 1050 graphics card, etc. Thanks for the tip!
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6 Replies
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You must erase that old HD but first.
If your going to keep your old boot drive in your system first thing you need to do is backup all the data that you want to keep. You can also copy any software installers that you want but there’s no point copying any of the installed Applications in the Program Files Folder(s). When software is installed there are many other places besides the Program Files Folder that stuff is installed and on top of that the Registry is Updated so it’s pointless to just copy the Apps Folders.
Now it is absolutely a must that you proceed to re-format this drive. If you don’t the OS may think this drive is part of you main System and you could end up with cross linked drives and files. New installations of software could install components on that old drive and that could really mess up you OS. Even worse your OS may link to the Registry on the old drive and that could be catastrophic.
As far as Raids go take a look at this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
I wouldn’t bother with a raid unless you have at least 3 or 4 brand new identically sized drives.
Next would be deciding what Level Raid you want to use based on what criteria are most important.Here’s an example of what I have done to get a high performance Raid and then some protection on my back drives.
I have a six drive Raid 0 Volume that gives me very high performance but essentially zero protection.
I then have a few Hardware Raid 5 Drives for Backups, these provide some safety but much less performance than the Raid 0 Volume. I also have some Hardware Raid 60 Drives that have adequate performance and much higher safety than the Raid 5 Drives.Note I stress Hardware Raid 5 and Raid 60 because I’ve seen far to many people lose far to much data relying on Software Raid 5 and 60 Volumes.
\”MY MEDIA MOTO: If you think three copies of your media is enough.
Take a moment to place a value on it and then maybe add two more.
Hard Drives are now stupidly cheap. A RE-SHOOT AND YOUR TIME AREN\’T.\” -
Thanks for the reply, Brent. My 3 HDD’s are all different sizes. Also, after 3 years I still haven’t produced a single frame of relevant video so I’m not concerned with losing “valuable” files. I will, however, format that one HDD. And thanks for the link.
Cheers! -
P.S. Sorry, Chris Wright has given me a ton of great advice, but I meant to thank Jeff Pulera for the Dell suggestion.
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Yes. If you plan on using that old system drive, you will want to get anything you want to keep off of it, then format the drive. One thing to keep in mind is that the old system drive most likely has a lot of hours running. I wouldn’t put anything you really want to keep on it without a backup. But then that goes to say with any HDD.
Good Luck!
TC -
Thanks, Todd. The PC I got the HDD from isn’t really that old, less than 3 years, and again, I’m never gonna make the all time great documentary or anything. If I lose files in the middle of a project of mine it’ll suck but it’s not like you guys who would have to explain to your clients what happened.
Only thing I’m trying to find now is how to configure the HDD’s, as in where to put Program, Projects, actual files, which HDD to render to, etc. I keep getting links to keyboard shortcuts so I must be wording my question wrong. I’ll keep looking.
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ok let me put it this way. I have 3 HDD’s. I have PPro on one, I will put my project file and media cache files on a second one, and my actual raw video files on the third. On which HDD should I render to?
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